


Anagnorisis

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, Injury Recovery, Married Couple, Married Sex, Partners to Lovers, Psychological Trauma, Romance, Scars, Trauma, Wedding Night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24385213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: He’s not exactly a stranger to issues with his body. The less said about his tween and teen years, the better, not that that’s unique to him, of course. But even now, in his ruggedly handsome Richard Castle incarnation, for all his vanity, his bluster, his swagger, he has the things he’s self-conscious about. He suspects he’s fortunate enough, obtuse enough, or both to exist on the mild end of the spectrum in that regard, but he has his share of things he’s meant to work on, things—in his more melodramatic moments—he’s meant to have someone else work on.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Kudos: 11





	Anagnorisis

He’s not exactly a stranger to issues with his body. The less said about his tween and teen years, the better, not that that’s unique to him, of course. But even now, in his ruggedly handsome Richard Castle incarnation, for all his vanity, his bluster, his swagger, he has the things he’s self-conscious about. He suspects he’s fortunate enough, obtuse enough, or both to exist on the mild end of the spectrum in that regard, but he has his share of things he’s meant to work on, things—in his more melodramatic moments—he’s meant to have someone else work on. 

He usually only goes down the latter road when it’s publicity time and he’s been manhandled and strategically lit and awkwardly posed to play up this, play down that, deal with the other thing. It’s Gina, then Paula, then Gina and Paula as the Traumatizing Tag Team who send him down that path when they achieve the impossible: They manage to make him absolutely sick of looking at himself. 

The fact that his relationship with his body is occasionally fraught is nothing new. The problem is, now—since he woke up in a hospital with two months of his life missing—the occasional has become the constant. 

He’s coping at first. He thinks he’s coping. He sees his barber. That’s the first order of business, and thank God, the place is just pretentious enough that no one remarks on how long it’s been. There's one patron who dares to gawp, but Vitaly shames him with a baleful stare and pointed snip of the scissors. 

Next up, he needs to deal with the unpleasant issue of the sea-weathered, sunburnt skin peeling and flaking of his face, his ears, the back of his neck, his forearms. But he copes with that, too. His array of expensive skincare products are exactly where he left them. Each jar and bottle and tube and pot has exactly the same amount of liquid, gel, paste, goop as they did back in May, and once he spends some quality time staring into the middle distance over that, he deals with his skin. 

She teases him about all of it—a little stiltedly, a little too forcefully, because they’re still awkward with each other. But she runs her fingers over the softly shaved nape of his neck and jokes that she was looking forward to pulling _his_ pigtails for once. She pokes fun at the exfoliants, the deep hydration masks, the toner, and the four-times-daily moisturizer that he sets a timer for. 

She teases, but there’s no hiding that she’s relieved that he’s starting to look like himself again. There’s no use pretending they aren’t both relieved about that. So they’re coping. He’s coping. 

Except there’s the scar. 

The scar is fine. It’s been thoroughly checked out, and it’s healing. It’s been thoroughly documented, too, because they might need records, in the unlikely event that anyone is ever prosecuted for his abduction, or whatever it is they should call it, given his apparent complicity in the whole damned thing. 

It’s fine, except it’s a phantom itch. It’s something that startles him every time he catches sight of it, every time his finger encounter it in the shower. It’s his equivalent of drunken tattoo he supposes—a part of his body that he feels no part of. 

The scar is an issue in those first few weeks when they’re timid with each other—when there are closed doors and carefully clutched clothing, when they slip into bed, covered head to toe and gingerly hold one another in the darkness. It’s an issue that she’s seen it only in photos, and an issue that he’s not ready for her to see it _not_ in photos. 

It’s better when they’re past that. She strides proudly from the bathroom in her invisible something special, and she comes to know the scar through ferocious, determined exploration and naked, cathartic sorrow. It’s better when she’s seen it, touched it, sunk her teeth into it—but it’s still an issue. 

He’s angry with himself about it. He’s furious, because it’s nothing. No one cut his chest open after he’d flatlined. No one literally took a piece of his heart with a not-quite-perfectly-aimed shot. Whatever someone _did_ do to him is not something he has to live with. There’s no terror and its unending echo lodged in his mind like there is in hers, and still it startles him to catch sight of it in the mirror, to forget it's there until his fingers or hers brush over it. 

It’s an issue. 

It is, if not actually the climax of his Inca Artifact Coma Fantasy, at the very least, the final bit of rising action. He leaps in front of her and takes a bullet to the heart. He dies with her at his side and the truth in this and every other plane of the multiverse on his lips: _Because I love you, Kate_. 

He wakes with her slapping his face, none-too-gently and he knows she is his Kate. He scrambles for her left hand,. The diamond sparkles even in the grim and gritty light of the coal plant, and he is at sudden and absolute rest in his body. Every cell, every tissue, every hair and scar and freckle and blemish is exactly as it should be, and he knows he has to marry her— _his_ Kate—immediately or sooner. 

So he does marry her as close to immediately as they can manage and still have the wedding mean what they want it to mean. He marries her on a mild night in November and he wades into the freezing cold with her, when she insists they have to—they _have_ to. He rushes, shivering, through the house with her tugging him by the hand. 

He strips her bare. He lets her strip him bare. They step together into the scalding cascade of the waterfall shower head. He runs his hands hungrily over the slick curves of her body—his _wife’s_ body. She returns the favor, her touch lingering over the diagonal slash of the scar. 

“It’s healing,” she says so quietly that he almost can’t hear her over the roar of the water. “Can hardly feel it any more.” 

It’s not true. It’s not _factually_ true, but he knows what she means. He knows it’s different. It’s part of him now—fully part of him, and it _seems_ smaller. 

“Shame,” he murmurs with his lips against the curve of her throat. “It was pretty butch.” 

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I needed to do an outside 10K, a few weeks ago. I chose the day, because it was only in the forties, so possibly the last day before June 1 when it won’t be miserable to run outside. (Until we have our traditional Memorial Day blizzard, that is. This joke, from when I posted this to Tumblr has not aged well. It was offing hot today [US Memorial Day].) I was going to do housekeeping the day I ran the 10K, and just put things up here, but then this popped into my head. 


End file.
